Touch And Go - Aiden Bates Page 0,63
offered him my glass and an apologetic grin, and he pursed his full lips with sass.
“Thanks, man.”
“Mm-hmm. Don’t mention it…and don’t expect it again.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” I downed the glass in one gulp and smiled when he squeezed my shoulder and headed back into the living room. Despite his surly attitude, he’d been hanging out all day and keeping me company, while the other brothers slipped in and out in shifts.
Uno was the other consistent presence, sitting at my feet and sighing at regular intervals. Getting the data off Ben’s computer was a long process. Way longer than I’d expected.
I’d hooked up the hard drive to my laptop and networked it through to Derek’s computer so I could work on a larger screen. I’d expected to have accessed the data within the hour. But whatever Ben had hidden on the encrypted drive, he’d hidden well. It was the late afternoon now, and I’d run though the most common access keys I knew, and all of the brothers had stopped by to look over my shoulder and poke at the screen. I was surprised to find I liked all of them—though I still had a favorite. That, of course, was the unparalleled Dr. Dish.
In the more meditative moments of typing fresh code to try and crack a way through the encryption data, my mind jumped back to that morning, our shower, Derek’s soapy, hot cock. I closed my eyes and inhaled deep, counting to ten before I exhaled. No need for a full-on erection. I needed all the blood in my brain, all my cognition to get into the hard drive, and I was glad when Matt pulled up a chair beside me. Even though he was a hottie in his own glowering way, his grumpy demeanor was the opposite of Derek’s, and it kept my dick down.
“Huh. How’s it going?” He’d come by earlier but left, probably unimpressed with my work then, but now he leaned in, curious.
“Yeah, I think I’m close, but I can’t really tell yet. I’ve broken through the first wall of encryption, and it looks like most of the data on the hard drive is intact, but this partition was encrypted too, and that’s proving to be harder than I thought.”
“English, please!” Richie called from the living room.
I craned my neck toward him. “I’m still working on it.”
“Thank you!” He sang out his words.
While the brothers’ constant attention frustrated me at times, I actually liked that they were interested in knowing what I was up to. It didn’t smack so much of being babied like it used to; now I felt like they were genuinely looking out for me as a member of their family.
I was getting way ahead of myself. Derek and I hadn’t talked. I still had no idea where I stood with him, or if we’d just had a one-time, or three-time, thing. No way could I get attached. Not to Derek or his brothers.
Matt scratched his chin. “Huh. But you got through the first wall. Any chance that same technique works with the next layer?”
“Tried it, no way in with the standard decryption software on the market—and trust me, I’ve got it all—so I’ve written this code from scratch to go in through a backdoor.”
“You wrote this?” Matt shifted closer and watched as my handwritten code ran through billions of variations on possible passcode combinations.
“Yeah, it’s working…or close to it, anyway. I might need to make a few tweaks. But that’s assuming there is a backdoor into the partition. If Ben got someone to create a custom code for his encryption, then it’s possible they didn’t leave any other way in.” It wasn’t complicated. I could either go in this way or not. But it was going to take a while to find out.
Matt grunted and sat back as he nodded at the screen. “Impressive. Mind if I watch?”
“Be my guest.” I’d taken him for an overbulked jock who loved God and country but didn’t have much else going on upstairs. Instead, he was nice in a gruff, big guy kind of way, smart too, and I appreciated his company.
Richie slipped out for his shift at the fire station and left us to it while Sean, Eli and Uno raided Derek’s pantry. Matt and I sat in silence with just the patter of my typing keeping us company in the study nook. I was completely comfortable with him. He seemed to follow a little of what I was doing, and I